Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 4 (1925-04).djvu/64

Rh back to town. Not that this ended the matter. Oh, no! Nor had I imagined that it would. I knew that while the devoted Sophie Delorme’s valiant and successful effort to place it in my hands had succeeded, even at the cost of her life, the attempts to destroy it would not cease until they had become futile; that is, until there were enough replicas of the manuscript spread broadcast to make it impossible to suppress the message entirely.

Things became quite too lively from that moment on. I had little time to do more than admire the courage and fidelity of the woman who had undoubtedly perished in the Differdale house, before I was myself involved in one accident after another. The motorman on the train I caught had a fainting spell and the train ran wild, smashed into the one ahead and broke things up pretty badly. I escaped with the tin box still in my arms, but scratched and cut by flying glass.

I got out at the next station, having walked the subway rails with other passengers, and took a taxi which proceeded to have a blowout and skid into a telegraph post. The driver was thrown out and injured severely, but I escaped—with a broken arm. My good arm still held the tin box. When the ambulance came for the driver, I made them take me to my own home. My doctor could not understand why I insisted upon hiding that tin box under the bedcovers, where I could hold on to it. He put my broken arm into a cast, and I had to resign myself to some weeks of inactivity.

I went over the manuscript at the first opportunity, with burning curiosity. I had to have the lock of the box broken open. It was done in my presence, of course, but in spite of my repeated warnings, the man who opened it let his tool slip and drove a hole through some of the sheets, making several words indecipherable. Fortunately, the damage was not great.

Meantime, I negotiated with several publishers for the printing of the manuscript. When I found a publisher, my next difficulty arose. How was I to safeguard it until it was in book form? I explained this to the head of the publishing concern, who provided two watchmen who never for a single instant let the manuscript out of their sight during the day, and at night it was locked into a safe in the presence of two people. Notwithstanding these precautions, things happened. I have never spent such a harrowing, nerve-racking time in my life as I spent last July and August, 1924.

N SPITE of the care with which the manuscript was watched, a lighted match was dropped upon some of it, and it was saved in the very nick of time. That caused a suggestion that it be typed in duplicate, which was done. During the typing, the young woman typist—whose probity is unquestionable, for she is a personal friend of mine, interested also in occult subjects—crumpled up quite a bunch of sheets given her to work from and threw them into the wastebasket, by mistake. Fortunately the loss was discovered before too late, and the pages retrieved. The typist cried, she felt so badly about it, and begged that I take charge of the manuscript sheets myself. I dictated it to her, after that, so that the papers did not leave my hands until safely typed.

One copy of these typed pages was shut up in the publisher’s safe with the original manuscript; the other was distributed in the printing room. A fire broke out in the printing room while the men were out at lunch, and the fire engines came, and the place was drenched, the sheets being almost ruined. Fortunately, we could replace spoiled sheets with clean ones from the other copy in the safe.